The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [329]
The Segurança had barely slipped her moorings when a shrilling tug halted her with a telegram:
WAIT UNTIL YOU GET FURTHER ORDERS BEFORE YOU SAIL. ANSWER QUICK. R. A. ALGER, SECRETARY OF WAR.68
It transpired that three unidentified warships had been sighted in the Gulf, apparently lying in wait for the invasion fleet.
While the Navy rushed to investigate, Shafter ordered his armada back to quayside. It was out of the question to disembark, since orders to proceed might be received at any minute; so for the next six days sixteen thousand men baked like sardines in their steel ovens.69
As if enduring some Ancient Mariner’s nightmare, Theodore Roosevelt paced the decks of the Yucatán, breathing the stench of dirty men and dying mules. Garbage clogged the quayside canal until it festered in the sun; the drinking-water tanks turned brackish, and Army rations of “fresh beef,” when opened, proved to be so disgusting that three out of every four cans were thrown overboard. A move out to midstream on 10 June afforded partial relief, although sharks made swimming hazardous.70 In any case most of the Rough Riders, having been brought up in the desert, were too transfixed by the sight of seawater to venture into it.71 Periodically Roosevelt went down to his cabin to vent his wrath in long letters to Henry Cabot Lodge. “I did not feel that I was fit to be Colonel of this regiment … but I am more fit to command a Brigade or a Division or attend to this whole matter of embarking and sending the army than many of those whose business it is.…”72
At last, in the late afternoon of 14 June, the Navy reported that all was safe in the Gulf. Under the bored gaze of three black women, three soldiers, and a gang of stevedores, the largest armed force ever to leave American shores swung out of the bay and steamed southeast into the gathering dusk, until Tampa Light shrank to a pinpoint, wavered, and went out.
CHAPTER 25
The Wolf Rising in the Heart
So into the strait
Where his foes lie in wait,
Gallant King Olaf
Sails to his fate!
NIGHT FELL, and the band of the 2nd Infantry struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Almost on cue, General Shafter’s invasion fleet lit up like a galaxy, spangling the dark sea from one horizon to the other. Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt stood with bared head on the bridge of the Yucatán, while soldierly emotions surged in his breast. He had no idea where he was being sent—it might not be Cuba at all, merely Puerto Rico—nor what he would be ordered to do when he got there; yet he believed “that the nearing future held … many chances of death, of honor and renown.” If he failed, he would “share the fate of all who fail.” But if he succeeded, he would help “score the first great triumph of a mighty world-movement.”1
Roosevelt supposed that his fellow Rough Riders could dimly feel what he was feeling, but found that only one of them had enough “soul and imagination” to articulate such thoughts. This was Captain “Bucky” O’Neill, the prematurely grizzled, chain-smoking ex-Mayor of Prescott, Arizona, and a sheriff “whose name was a byword of terror to every wrong-doer, white or red.” O’Neill was capable of “discussing Aryan word-roots … and then sliding off into a review of the novels of Balzac.” He could demonstrate Apache signs which reminded Roosevelt curiously of those used by the Sioux and Mandans in Dakota.2 He was, in short, a kindred soul, a man to contemplate the night sky with.
“He led these men in one of the noblest fights of the century.”
Colonel Roosevelt and his Rough Riders atop San Juan Heights, Cuba. (Illustration 25.1)
“Who would not risk his life for a star?” asked Bucky, as the two officers leaned against the railings and searched for the Southern Cross. The metaphor made up in sincerity what it lacked in originality, and it was duly recorded for quotation in Roosevelt’s war memoirs.3
For six days the armada steamed southeast across a glassy ocean, under cloudless